Roughly two-fifths of Americans now believe in UFOs, polls suggest, signaling a resurgence of popular-cultural interest in extraterrestrials possibly buzzing around us.
Last week, Congress held an extraordinary (and predictably tabloid-y) hearing on “unidentified aerial phenomena,” a respectable rebranding of “unidentified flying objects,” a topic long associated with conspiracy theory and late-night talk shows. The hearing capped an epic quest to uncover a secret government UFO program, which came to light in 2017.
It sounds like a story arc from television’s “The X-Files.” And the revelations have sparked a revival in ufology, a passion that had faded along with the Cold War that inspired it.
“Maybe the world is catching up with where the UFO believers have always been,” said Jim Harold, a podcaster who hosts one of the internet’s longest-running shows on the paranormal.
Belief in UFOs seems to be cresting. The share of Americans who believe UFO sightings offer likely proof of alien life rose from 20 percent in 1996 to 34 percent in 2022, according to polls by Newsweek and YouGov.
An Ipsos poll, released on the eve of the congressional hearing, found that 42 percent of Americans believe in UFOs, while 1 in 10 respondents claims to have seen one. A 2021 report by Pew Research found that half of the nation believes military UFO reports constitute probable or definite evidence of extraterrestrial life.
No other subject, perhaps, inspires such persistent talk about conspiracies and cover-ups. A Gallup poll in 2019 found that 68 percent of respondents believe the U.S. government knows “more about UFOs than it is telling us.”
In the congressional hearing, two former Navy fighter pilots testified about encounters with UFOs whose movements they could not explain. While the stories didn’t prove alien contact, the mysteries behind them evidently remain unsolved, and the accounts came from credible sources.
The Pentagon has formed an office to investigate UFO sightings and has released declassified reports on unidentified aerial phenomena. NASA has ordered an independent UFO study and impaneled a team to write it.
For the growing community of ufologists, those were watershed events.
“This has been huge for the community of general enthusiasts, but also for the people who take UFO research seriously,” said Greg Eghigian, a historian at Penn State University who is writing a history of the UFO.
“They have been very emboldened. They feel vindicated by all this. And every new hearing makes them all the more confident that they’ve been on the right track all along.”
The UFO craze arguably took flight in 1947, when a private pilot described an encounter with strange aircraft that “flew like a saucer,” thus inspiring the term flying saucer.
Fueled by Cold War fears, ufology populated innumerable films, books and conventions in the decades that followed, a zeitgeist memorably captured in the Steven Spielberg films “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977) and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” (1982).
Harold, the paranormal podcaster, grew up with a UFO story passed down from his parents. It happened one night around 1970 in a remote corner of West Virginia, where the parents had parked their car on a date. All of a sudden, they said, the sky went from pitch black to ballpark-bright.
“My dad looked to his left and said there was a man with a welding mask, holding his hands up,” Harold recalled. Moments later, darkness returned.
“Maybe that’s what started my interest in all this,” Harold said.
UFO sightings piled up over the years. By the late 1990s, however, the Cold War was over and the internet era had dawned. Ufology gradually faded.
“You talk to a lot of veteran ufology people and they’re like, ‘Man, the internet killed us,’” Eghigian said. “In a weird way, it really took a lot of steam from what had been a longstanding movement that had been built on people getting together.”
And that was more or less how things stood until 2017, when The New York Times, the very antithesis of a supermarket tabloid, announced the secret Pentagon UFO program.
“I think, to some extent, the time was right for UFOs to make a comeback,” Eghigian said. “We are in a period of remarkable advancement in surveillance technologies.”
At the recent congressional hearing, more than one lawmaker sounded convinced of a UFO cover-up.
“It is unacceptable to continue to gaslight Americans into thinking this is not happening,” said Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican.
Others in Congress, including the New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seemed to view the proceedings more as an opportunity to demand transparency from the Defense Department, UFO cover-up or no.
The growing federal scrutiny of UFO claims could complete the rebranding of a stigmatized subject, one long consigned to drive-in theaters, roadside attractions and the Weekly World News.
Last year, academic researchers surveyed university professors on their own UFO beliefs. Some scholars responded with predictable unease, if not outright hostility. But 19 percent of respondents conceded that they or someone close to them had spotted a UFO.
Government-sanctioned ufology may well be one reason why more Americans are embracing UFOs. Other forces may also be at play.
Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist, theorizes that acceptance of UFOs may be rising partly in response to the well-documented decline in religious faith.
Not quite half of all Americans now say they are sure God exists, a historic low. One-third of the nation never goes to church.
The less religious people are, research has found, the more likely they are to believe in UFOs.
Both belief systems illustrate the same basic human need, Routledge said: the search for meaning.
“We just have a longing for things beyond rational, evidence-based thinking,” he said. “I think it speaks to the human need for a broader cosmic connection.”
The idea of alien contact, while unproven, is more palatable to some ufologists than the existence of angels or demons or ghosts, concepts that fall outside the bounds of science.
“You don’t have to believe in anything supernatural to believe in UFOs,” Routledge said.